She said nothing of what he had feared.  She permitted herself to be embraced, and drooping her head, burst into desperate weeping, as though the presence of her husband brought into higher relief the image of her son whom she would never see again.  Then she dried her tears, and paler and sadder than ever, continued her habitual life.

Ferragut saw her as serene as a school-mistress, with her two little nieces seated at her feet, keeping on with her eternal lace-work.  She forgot it only in order to attend to the care of her husband, occupying herself with the very slightest details of his existence.  That was her duty.  From childhood, she had known what are the obligations of the wife of the captain of a ship when he stops at home for a few days, like a bird of passage.  But back of such attentions, Ulysses divined the presence of an immovable obstacle.  It was something enormous and transparent that had interposed itself between the two.  They saw each other but without being able to touch each other.  They were separated by a distance, as hard and luminous as a diamond, that made every attempt at drawing nearer together useless.

Cinta never smiled.  Her eyes were dry, trying not to weep while her husband was near her, but giving herself up freely to grief when she was alone.  Her duty was to make his existence bearable, hiding her thoughts.

But this prudence of a good house-mistress was trampling under foot their conjugal life of former times.  One day Ferragut, with a return of his old affection, and desiring to illuminate Cinta’s twilight existence with a pale ray of sunlight, ventured to caress her as in the early days of their marriage.  She drew herself up, modest and offended, as though she had just received an insult.  She escaped from his arms with the energy of one who is repelling an outrage.

Ulysses looked upon a new woman, intensely pale, of an almost olive countenance, the nose curved with wrath and a flash of madness in her eyes.  All that she was guarding in the depths of her thoughts came forth, boiling over, expelled in a hoarse voice charged with tears.

“No, no!...  We shall live together, because you are my husband and God commands that it shall be so; but I no longer love you:  I cannot love you....  The wrong that you have done me!...  I who loved you so much!...  However much you may hunt in your voyages and in your wicked adventures, you will never find a woman that loves you as your wife has loved you.”

Her past of modest and submissive affection, of supine and tolerant fidelity, now issued from her mouth in one interminable complaint.

“From our home my thoughts have followed you in all your voyages, although I knew your forgetfulness and your infidelity.  All the papers found in your pockets, and photographs lost among your books, the allusions of your comrades, your smiles of pride, the satisfied air with which you many times returned, the series of new manners and additional care of your person that you did not have when you left, told me all....  I also suspected in your bold caresses the hidden presence of other women who lived far away on the other side of the world.”